Month: April 2014

You may be wondering why I haven’t leapt into the current wave of 90s/Britpop nostalgia with all the teeth-bared alacrity of a pseudo-academic Berserker, desperate to point out that the career of Alex James highlights everything wrong with the world. The reasons I haven’t are, broadly, that a) I desire a worthier opponent than Alex James; b) Britpop isn’t, and really never was, the problem. Anything I might want to say about Britpop is wider than Britpop itself and concerns the particular intertwined development of politics, culture and society in that weird and decisive decade.

The problem with the 90s wasn’t simply that “politics” (specifically, the recognition of class as a political identity) vanished from mainstream pop culture, but that it vanished from mainstream politics too. After the Tories’ scorched-earth approach to industry in the 80s, the 90s saw a salting of the ground though privatization of the railways and…

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I wrote this, an examination of the projects coming out of the Big Society. Including the Trussel Trust Foodbank franchise, and the Shaftesbury Partnership. It’s my third outing on Pieria and I am rather proud of it. I think it’s worth reading and I don’t often say that about my own stuff. I look specifically at the plans within the Shaftesbury Partnership to reconfigure training of social workers(apparently they only need 5 weeks training….) to create a layer of policy makers, and social workers who dont have to be troubled with the actual knowledge base that underpins social work. Basically you could sub this article ‘Privatisation 2.0.

In it, I briefly allude to Nurse First, the baby of Chris Mould, the executive at the head of the Trussel Trust. That patron saint of hungry people.

”Reducing inappropriate prescribingLast year Western Cheshire PCT spent in the region of £500,000 on prescriptions for oral nutritional supplements to treat and preventing malnutrition but up to 75% may have been inappropriately prescribed. The project developed and implemented nutrition care pathways to include malnutrition screening and guidelines on prescribing and monitoring of nutritional supplements to improve the identification and management of malnutrition. Money raised for pilot: £51,000
Cash-releasing cost savings: £300,000”

When I wrote this article about Food Poverty, and I mentioned that GPs were under considerable pressure NOT to prescribe Oral Nutritional Supplements to prevent malnutrition, even when they are clearly needed, because the NHS is not there to plug deficits in household food budgets, THAT is what I was talking about. Roughly. That would be one of the first projects from Nurse First, baby of Chris Mould, the patron saint of hungry people. Working to prevent hungry people getting the type of help that prevents malnutrition. Not the dried food parcels that do not such thing, but bring him a great deal of influence. Clearly 75% of food supplements, in a country with the type of food poverty that allowed Trussell Trust’s expansion plans to go ahead, were wrongly prescribed…..food poverty isn’t a thing is it?